User talk:Merrystar
testing sig button --Merrystartoo 23:25, October 8, 2010 (UTC) Site Status Hi there, There seems to be some major confusion regarding the site, so I will attempt to clear it up as best I can. Some background: :Recently, the Wizard101 game underwent a fairly large overhaul of its rules, content, and game dynamics. This made 90% of our 8000 pages out-of-date in regards to the new systems and content. This includes older content as well, because the way the pages interact with each other via MediaWiki code (some of the most in-depth I've seen on any Wiki of our type), this necessitates recoding every page and recoding all of our templates for those pages. This is because they do not allow for interactions with new game dynamics and content and because many have been made out-of-date immediately. :Also recently, Wiki overhauled the skins and coding available for running sites. This change in skin and code immediately made 6000 of our 8000 pages (75%) not work right at all. We have not yet been able to discern exactly why they aren't working, but we are certain it has to do with code and skin changes of which we were not informed. In the wake of this, it was decided with unanimous user support over two months of open, public discussion that two things would happen. One, the primary site would be moved to a new location. This was done with unanimous user support (not a single dissenter arose over months, and every single editor, registered or not, was informed via global messages; furthermore, every single active editor from the last 3 months and every major editor/admin in the history of the site was also messaged directly on their talk pages). Two, this site would be a site "archiving" the state of the game before the Celestia update. This does not mean a frozen site, but it does mean that content has to be very carefully evaluated to ensure that it is before the game update (which includes a lot more content than just Celestia material). This second point was decided upon in the wake of Wikia's refusal to discuss anything with us. Since the update, I personally have over 20 unanswered emails to Wikia regarding direct problems from the new skin and code that are as of yet unresolved. Additionally, we have had a long history of Wikia not responding to what the users of the site wish to do with the site, so we pretty consider ourselves to be on our own with regards to site maintenance (we managed to get the rich text editor disabled only after a long email fight on the part of one of our admins, despite the fact that it was clearly the desire of the site users over months of open discussion). Your message on my talk page implied that all new content on the wiki was deleted, this could not be further from the truth and I hope it was not a purposeful insinuation. If you actually review the history, ALL new content and edits that is pre-Celestia and added according to the site rules and guidelines has remained intact. The ONLY deletions have been post-update changes, which invalidate much of the other material on the site, spam, vandalism, and edits which are so poor in spelling, grammar, or accuracy that they are actually edits of false information, which have always been deleted on this site. Misspelling one letter in a word creates a very different piece of information in this game, often a contradictory piece of information and improperly added information has been one of the worst problems on this site for years (along with a very high proportion of vandalism, on average over long term 20-30% of all non-admin edits are vandalism, though since the Wikia update its been on average over 50% and up often 90% of daily edits). In fact, this is the reason why MediaWiki parserfunction-based templates became the standard of the site: to reduce the demands upon the users and improve site accuracy and maintenance. In fact, edit accuracy went up over 1000% (yes one thousand) after parserfunction templates were introduced. Again, like I pointed out before, 75% of our pages are no longer properly functioning in the wake of the Wikia update and we are working towards remedying that problem. So if you see a lot of deletions, please take the time to understand why they were deleted. You also mentioned protection of pages that people are editing. Pages that have been protected have only been done so for three reasons: One, if they have been vandalized AND they are pages which are already complete in terms of their game content, or Two, page names of restricted content that are being continually recreated by unregistered users or users who aren't reading the rules of the site before making new pages, and Three, they are pages that control page content and site navigation that are being edited with inappropriate and misleading information. Essentially, they are being protected to prevent false or inappropriate information, vandals, and messing up the navigation and format of the site and there have been NO protections on pages people should not be editing. Given that Wikia has eliminated our ability to edit our welcome messages or send global messages we cannot preemptively help to inform new users the way we used to about the rules of editing the site via methods other than direct talk page interaction and corrective administrative edits. We have a well-prepared, easily accessible document on rules of the site and highly visible posts on the main page. In the past, this did little to ensure that new users actually read any of the rules before editing, and the only tools that improved things are now gone. Not surprisingly, the amount of poor, inaccurate, purposely false information and vandalizing edits have dramatically increased on the site, so the amount of admin deletions and page protections have increased accordingly, though re-actively as opposed to proactively. Overall I found your assessment uninformed and un-researched, which I found fairly disappointing. The site is not frozen, which is proven by the edit history, and nothing is deleted or protected that does not break the rules and guidelines of the site. The site has a specific user-input purpose which many new users have not been respecting as they have not read the rules of the site before editing anew. And because of restrictions placed upon the admins we are unable to do anything substantial regarding major corrective action to users of the site. That should clarify things. Thanks, ErinEmeraldflame 21:11, December 1, 2010 (UTC) Reply I have submitted far more problems than that to Wikia than one email. And I never received any responses. I do not have a spam filter on that email, so that can not be the cause of lack of receipt. And yes, I did absolutely wonder if Wikia was receiving anything, which is why I actually tried a variety of different ways, including the userlist, of contacting Wikia about problems, none of which resulting in a response. Given that other people have posted similar experiences, and given the rudeness I have seen displayed in the past to our site and others, I was not surprised. I have also tried using the community forums when I was getting spammed in email by another wiki within Wikia as a result of me accidentally visiting the site, but I found the responses (or was it single response) very disappointing and lacking (especially since it was a clear violation of site policies and anti-spam law and Wikia staff didn't respond at all as far as I know). The signature button was not working on the site properly for about a week; a single test doesn't prove function for something that is coming and going on an irregular basis. Additionally, unregistered users (plural) were able to edit multiple protected pages on the site (plural) for about a week as well. I was not referring to the single staff member who made edits that disrupted the main page and changed the meaning of the content on the main page, which they edited without asking or even contacting admins despite its content being protected. The MediaWiki welcome pages have not operating consistently, they have been sometimes showing up and sometimes not. Also, the ability to edit those pages has not been consistent, attempted edits since the update have resulted in nothing happening; there are no messages of protection, but changes are not recognized. Like most problems since the update, these are inconsistent in their functionality. Also, given that the talk page message bubbles do not work on all browsers (including my fully updated version of Firefox) they are not an effective way of communicating with the community. Furthermore, the purpose the community corner served on our site is defunct now that now it was deleted from its place on our main page when the new skin was implemented. And, for some mysterious reason, hours of work I personally put into the main page were also all deleted when the skin was implemented. So given that long established, MediaWiki default methods of communication have all been removed or deleted, there are not many options left of purposefully informing the community and the site announcements are the only thing left that might work. Edits by users using the RTE were creating massive amounts of vandalization on the site as the RTE was deleting more than 90% of the content of any template page it edited and destroying formatting on any other page it edited. I spent hours daily fixing RTE-induced problems on the site for the first month of my adminship, and we eventually had to adopt a policy of allowing rollbacks of any edits using the RTE because it took too long to fix the problems sometimes. It took a LONG time to get wikia to shut it down despite user and admin preference (over 95% of the active community) and the fact that the program was actually DELETING content on the wiki and destroying formatting on the site due to major bugs in its program. Regarding pages on the site, we are quite capable of dealing with the issues ourselves, though again, we have not yet been informed of any of the actual changes that took place by Wikia, so attempting to change MediaWiki code to deal with issues in code recognition by the new skins and software can only currently be done via trial and error. We have tried asking people within the Wikia community about coding issues we've had before, but to date we have never received or seen a response indicating that anyone else actually understands the code for our site to the level that we do nor have we have never seen a site within Wikia with coding as detailed and in-depth as ours. Given that, we would appreciate Wikia staff not editing the code on the site as we have not been given an indication of ability with regards to our code, especially when some pages rely on a dozen different templates to function. It would be more appropriate for Wikia to actually provide the information regarding what code changes were implemented on the site so that admins of sites can actually know what is going on. Finally, the only users on the site that have been confused and frustrated about what they are allowed to post or not are new users to the site who have not taken the time to read the editing guide, rules and guidelines, main page, forums, or any of the many other places where they would have learned better. I even point out the dozens of times older users have actually corrected some of the same new users in this, proving my point. It is not relevant and overly accusatory to refer to a few cases of new users who come to the site, edit without reading the policies, and then get upset about the policies when it by no means represents the norm. ErinEmeraldflame 19:17, December 3, 2010 (UTC) Never claimed or gave any indication of leaving I am going to deal with one thing at a time then, and what I consider to be the most important one comes first. I have never once made a post saying that I was leaving the site. In the last month, I have diligently maintained the site and kept it free from vandalism and spam. I have also made more constructive edits to the site than most or all other editors, the only possible exceptions being other, established community members that also continued to help maintain the site during my recent downturn in edits (1000 weekly edits can have a tremendous effect on wrists). All edits and deletions of content to the site have been made following community-decided policy to the letter, a community that remained much as it was before this all started. Not a single thing was ever deleted on this wiki to facilitate any moving to another site. In fact, 10 of the 18 pages you restored contain false information. 1 is nonsense, and the other 9 were posted before the updated live realm material was released publicly. We do not permit test realm material on the wiki because it changes so much before it goes live that there is no way to ever determine what is real and what isn't making it inherently untrustworthy and therefore false. And based on past history, any pet pages with mixtures of false and true information have to be purged and restarted because people often edit real information into those pages accommodating the false information making all of the information improperly entered and therefore false. This was a major problem before with several pet pages and I am trying to avoid it again. So I am asking again for you to please stop making these claims about my motives on the site and to please stop making edits, posting comments, and posting edit remarks based on those claims. They are untrue and defamatory and completely inappropriate based on the rules of this site and the policies of Wikia. ErinEmeraldflame 05:49, December 7, 2010 (UTC) storm beetle I hi just recieved your message. the change needs to be made to to storm beetle. The 7th talent is health gift I have already told Wikia that you are banned from the site for gross infractions of the site policy, the Wikia helper policy, and the Wikia user agreement. Cease and desist immediately. ErinEmeraldflame 17:34, January 22, 2011 (UTC)